Tablet shipments declined more than 14 percent worldwide during the first quarter of 2016, according to the latest stats from IDC.

The research firm said the decline was due to general seasonality combined with an overall disinterested customer base.

. . . .

As for the vendors, the most dramatic year-over-year change comes from Amazon, which increased tablet shipments by an astronomical 5421.7 percent to claim the No. 3 spot on the list. The tech giant wasn’t even included in the top five tablet vendors in the first quarter of 2015.

Amazon’s growth is due primarily to its range of slate tablets, such as the $49.99 version of Amazon’s Fire tablet, which have become synonymous with the low-end of the market.

For Amazon, the low price is part of a strategy that CEO Jeff Bezos has referred to as “the Amazon Doctrine.” In a nutshell, Amazon cares less about tablets as end products and more as direct commerce channels for users to buy products from Amazon.

The fire tablets are fine all-around android based slabs. I use mine for ereading, web browsing, email, games, netflix. I have an older model that I picked up as a doorbuster for $99 a few years ago and it works just great. My daughter has the $50 version (on sale for $36) and it works well too, although her Sims have taken up most of it’s memory.

4g is an ereader option, not a tablet option. Kindle is the ereader. Fire is the tablet. Very different.

Email works fine and is linked to my gmail account, as is calendar which is also reasonably functional. I’m not a power user of either. While there are not millions of apps, most of the best ones are available and you can usually find something that works for you. I have overdrive installed so I can get books from the library right on the device, and as a bonus that app manages and opens epub files. Writing apps exist, and bluetooth works fine for keyboards, headphones, etc.

One thing that disturbs people not used to it is the carousel interface. Instead of the default view being a desktop that you arrange icons on, the default view is a scrolling list of books, music and apps, arranged in chronological order. You either like that or hate that.

What that accomplishes for ebook consumers is that books don’t exist inside the kindle app ghetto that is the norm for some other platforms. With those, you have to open the kindle app to see your books and read them. On a fire, your books are seen, individually, on the same level as apps or anything else, and you just open them to read them. Since I do a fair amount of reading on the device, I like that.

Another thing you see on a fire that is different is that ‘amazon shopping’ is a built-in app. Even more so, above the carousel is a list of categories (books, music, apps, etc) which presents you with a “bookcase” listing of your content, and each of these ‘cases’ has an option that directs you out to an integrated Amazon shopping experience for that particular type of content, all seamlessly tied to your already configured Amazon account. Many reviewers say that a kindle fire seems like a conduit that Amazon uses to sell you things. Of course, as a regular Amazon customer, I see that and say “so what?” Yes, they have stuff for sale. You don’t buy stuff? What sort of life do you lead, anyway?

Exactly. Competing ereaders were all PC accessories and mostly useless without a PC to feed them via USB or SD card. It took years for the competition to match the basic feature but in many ways they still haven’t caught up.

It’s as good for general usage as any other 7″ android tablet, except for being tied to the Amazon appstore instead of Google Play. That’s not really as big of a restriction as you might think. Most popular apps are available there, and sideloading other apps is not difficult. There are workarounds to add the Google Play store and apps, but I haven’t bothered. There isn’t a 4G version available, these are wifi only.

It works well for watching movies or playing games. The battery life is excellent for a low cost tablet, over 8 hours playing video with wifi on. It only has a mono speaker, so use headphones or an external speaker if you like music. I use mine with a cheap bluetooth speaker.

It’s not the best tablet out there, but for $50 (or the $35 I payed during the Black friday sale), it’s very good.

If that number is close to correct, it’s pretty impressive -and very different from the stories I’d read elsewhere. Of course, a lot of those negative stories about Kindle sales were just wishful thinking by ADS sufferers. It would seem to be very good news for those of us publishing through KDP.

On the other hand, I know people who own Fire tablets and don’t read on them at all. They just bought the Fire because it was an impressive piece of hardware at a competitive price. (I’m still trying to sell them on the Paperwhite)

Does Amazon not sell the Fire in Canada? I only see two options for the Fire and both are from 3rd party sellers for too much money.
I think I’ll just go to memory express and save the shipping charges.

ETA: never mind. Just checked the reviews on the Canadian site. Lots of folks annoyed because most of the amazon services, such as streaming video, aren’t available to Canadian prime customers so no sense in trying to buy a Fire.

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